Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (79 page)

A set of analogies — explanations more than caricatures — can help clarify the root cause of the bike-renting paradox. Imagine you are in a grocery store and you head for the produce department because you know there’s a sale on cherries, and when you get there you find that there are only a few boxes of cherries left on the shelf. Well, you can be pretty sure that
those
boxes are full of damaged and rotting fruit — they are the dregs that no one wanted to take. By contrast, if the shelf is bursting with boxes of cherries, then damaged or rotting fruits are only a very small proportion of the whole, and even if customers shun them as they choose their boxes, the poor ones won’t dominate, so your chance of picking up a box of barely edible fruit will be fairly low. As another example, consider the perennial lament of single people who are no longer so young: “At my age, anyone who’s still available is bound to have some fatal hidden flaw!” And one can also think of those straggling few items of clothing, usually very unappealing, that remain unpurchased on the shelf at the tail end of a big sale — or then again one can imagine a factory visitor who is astonished to observe that, among the very rare items that are rejected by the quality-control checkers, not a one is up to par. But no surprise here — indeed, that’s the whole point of having quality control! In the case of rentable bicycles, each cyclist who participates in the program cannot help but play the role of a quality-control checker. A bike that has visible problems will be scanned quickly and passed over. This simple analogy shows why there is no reason to be surprised that bikes on sparsely populated racks are nearly always defective.

Collectively, all these analogous situations reveal an interesting fact. Without any abstract explanation having been provided, a new category has nonetheless come into focus — that of
items whose rarity is a symptom of defectiveness, because a limited supply guarantees that a process of selection will take place in which the best items are systematically taken first, and the items that remain to the end will have been rejected by many potential consumers.
This is why, whenever one spots a rack with just a handful of bikes in it, then those bikes, rather than being akin to gemstones, are more akin to ugly ducklings.

The lesson here goes beyond the utility of arguments based on concrete examples. To devise a good explanatory analogy, it won’t suffice to make it down-to-earth; in fact, adding lots of concrete details can easily cloud up an explanation, making the gist get lost in the fog. What’s crucial in devising a good explanatory analogy is how clearly the invented scenario embodies an abstraction. That is, a successful explanatory analogy is one in which an abstract conceptual skeleton has been very naturally realized in a concrete situation, so the two go together like hand and glove. The conceptual skeleton is then likely to jump out effortlessly to anyone who hears the argument.

For example, a situation in which customers are free to choose the items they are buying (cherries, or items on sale) brings out as a salient fact that when there are few items remaining, they’re the ones that didn’t pass muster in the eyes of many customers, and so they are
of course
very likely to be defective. This is a clear and helpful image. The metaphor of quality control, where the only items available to purchase are ones that have failed an official test, is equally clear and helpful, because it effortlessly brings out the idea that
stragglers tend to be of low quality.
These explanatory analogies effortlessly lead one to the conceptual skeleton that they all share. They make understanding far
easier and more direct than would an isolated verbalization of the conceptual skeleton, such as the legalistic phrase we wrote out a couple of paragraphs up: “items whose rarity is a symptom of defectiveness, because a limited supply guarantees that a process of selection will take place in which the best items are systematically taken first and the items that remain to the end will have been rejected by many potential consumers”.

Humans automatically try
on their own
to extract a conceptual skeleton from any concrete situation — that’s how they understand — whereas being handed a highly abstract phrase of legalese (such as our long phrase above), no matter how accurately it might capture the conceptual skeleton’s essence, is likely to lead only to puzzlement. This idea has important repercussions in education, to be discussed in the next chapter.

In their book
Mental Leaps
, psychologists Keith Holyoak and Paul Thagard tell the droll story of a fictitious researcher in decision-making who has the luck of being offered a job in a prestigious rival institution, which throws him into a major dilemma. If he accepts the job, his salary and professional prestige will both take leaps, but on the other hand, the move would be a huge emotional upheaval for his entire family. A colleague whom he privately asks for advice reacts, “Hey, what’s with you? You’re one of the world’s experts on how decisions are made. Why are you coming to see
me? You’re
the one who invented super-sophisticated statistical models for making optimal decisions. Apply your own work to your dilemma; that’ll tell you what to do!” His friend looks at him straight in the eye and says, “Come off it, would you? This is
serious
!”

The fact is that when we are faced with serious decisions, although we can certainly draw up a list of all sorts of outcomes, assigning them numerical weights that reflect their likelihoods of happening as well as the amount of pleasure they would bring us, on the basis of which we can then calculate the “optimal” choice, this is hardly the way that people who are in the throes of major decision-making generally proceed. What we all do in such situations is to draw on one or more analogues in our memory. Here are a few types of familiar and important situations in life — categories we all know — in which people automatically behave in this way.

Let’s take a look at the first item. When one has received a job offer, one thinks it over, comparing the potential job with jobs one has already had, and particularly with jobs of the same sort. What could be more self-evident? And if one has never had a job that would afford a useful perspective, then one quickly jumps, without even thinking about it, to the experiences of people one knows. This means, for instance, that one recalls a job that one’s sister once had, and one imports it to one’s own life, carrying over all the things she described — the good points, the bad ones, the complications, and so forth. To be sure, one can’t import
everything
she said about her job, since most of it is irrelevant to the potential job; one has to know how to arrive at a key nugget of knowledge, abstracted from her tales, which seems relevant. And then this nugget is imported into one’s own life much as if one were trying on an item of clothing before purchasing it. When the stakes are high, as they are when a job is involved, one doesn’t stop there; one looks for other perspectives to shed further light. After a certain number of tryings-on of this sort, one generally homes in on just one of the explored perspectives and makes a decision after careful consideration of it alone. “Always being caught between two bosses who never agree on anything? My sister once had a job like that and it gave her so much grief — so no thanks.”

The idea is simple: the only way we have of making decisions, whether they are small or large, is through analogy — that is, by making analogies with a spectrum of previous experiences (whether personal or vicarious) that have been brought to mind by the pressing decision.

Even when a decision comes down to something so basic as a single figure — the salary of a new job, for instance, or the square footage of an addition to a house, or the number of days of rain per year in a new city — one ponders this number by making comparisons with prior cases that are more familiar: someone whom one knows well and who gets roughly the same salary; a room that is roughly the same size as the proposed addition; another city where one has lived that gets roughly the same amount of annual rainfall. Such comparisons are inevitable, because the past that we have lived through is all we have for thinking about the future.

Thus comparison, whether it is conscious or unconscious, voluntary or forced, is inevitable. Sometimes the analogies themselves are in the driver’s seat; other times, we analogy-makers are in the driver’s seat — and all intermediate shades between those extremes exist. The process is passive at times, and other times it is very active, but whether it manipulates us or we manipulate it, whether we are the leader or the follower in the dance, analogy is our perennial dancing partner.

Decisions at much higher levels than those just discussed are also made by earthbound human beings — global decisions, decisions that may profoundly affect thousands or millions of human lives for the better or for the worse. These decisions are always based on analogies to historical precedents. We are speaking of political decisions, of course, and specifically of wartime decisions.

In global situations, the influence of such analogies is so far-reaching that it squelches all other potential sources of decisions, since politicians and governments cannot afford to appear internally inconsistent. A country, in its quest for internal consistency, can even be forced by an analogy that is very blatant into taking a stance that would seem to run against its best interests. Such a situation arose for Greece during the Falkland Islands War between Argentina and Great Britain in 1982; because of a screamingly obvious analogy, Greece took sides in a curious fashion.

The Falklands lie very close to Argentina, but despite this, they are a British territory. One would have expected, for numerous reasons, that Greece would side with Argentina in this conflict. For instance, thirty years earlier, Greek Cypriots had revolted against the British rule of Cyprus, and this led to Cyprus being given to Greece. This was one clear reason for Greece to side against Britain. In addition, Argentina was, like Greece, a developing country with a fundamentally Mediterranean population (an obvious analogical force, to be sure). And finally, the geographical proximity of the Falklands to Argentina, as well as the international political climate against colonialist aims of all sorts, would seem to have made it an open and shut case.

And yet Greece didn’t do what these various analogies would have led one to expect; it sided instead with Britain. What secret lobby swung the Greek government in this direction? Well, there was simply a more compelling analogy, which involved Greece’s bitter decades-long dispute with Turkey over the ownership of Cyprus. The analogy mapping Turkey to Argentina and Greece to the United Kingdom leaps instantly to the eye, as both cases involve islands ruled by countries that are much farther away than the countries that seek to possess them. For Greece to side with Argentina in this dispute would therefore have been “the same thing” as siding with Turkey in the dispute over Cyprus; indeed, Cyprus could well be called “the Falkland Islands of Greece”! A choice by Greece to align itself with Argentina would thus have played straight into the hands of its rival Turkey, and would have seriously undermined Greece’s position vis-à-vis the ownership of Cyprus. Analogy forced Greece’s hand.

In his fascinating and carefully documented book
Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965
, the political theorist Yuen Foong Khong tackles the thorny question of the reasons that underlay the choices made by the American leaders, both military and civilian, during the Vietnam War, particularly in its earlier phases in the 1960s. Khong analyzes a range of historical precedents that were available to be drawn on, including the Korean War, conducted by the United States some fifteen years earlier, the defeat of the French in Indochina, the Munich conference in 1938, in which Sudetenland was conceded to Hitler, the Berlin crisis of 1948, which gave rise to an airlift of food and other supplies, the long insurrection in Malaysia, lasting from 1948 through 1960, and the economic crisis in Greece in 1947. Another potential analogue that Khong suggests, and that we will look into shortly, is simply called “the thirties”.

Khong explores the role played by analogies that were publicly mentioned by the decision-makers during the Vietnam War, asking whether the American leaders made their decisions solely by “pure reasoning” (that is, bypassing all analogies) and later gave official justifications of their decisions by pointing to historical analogues in order to win over the masses, who, rather like children, are always looking for simple explanations. Through the analysis of many transcribed conversations among the American leaders, Khong concludes that, quite to the contrary, in every major Vietnam War decision, one analogy or another was the key factor. In other words, analogies were not merely cynically exploited as façades to hide the real reasons from the naïve public. Moreover, in each case, for one historical analogue to emerge victorious in the war among rival analogies, it took intense fighting over a long period — sometimes several years — among the main participants in the decision process.

The fact that analogies were always central to the decision-making process hardly comes as a surprise to us, but what about the alleged alternative — namely, decisions supposedly made through a “pure reasoning” process, supposedly in the total absence of analogies?